iPad - PA Semi Inside?

[Trev]

Here's a bit of speculation that I haven't seen posted yet, though I may have missed it, from http://stevecheney.posterous.com/the-genius-in-apples-vertical-platform by way of Slashdot:

This analysis is not yet mainstream, but will add tremendous fuel to the fire that perhaps the A4 is NOT an ARM architecture. In fact, it’s highly possible that the A4 is a dual core Power Architecture, which is what the PA Semi team worked with, prior to Apple buying them in 2007.

What's funny is that if this is true, then a PowerPC-native iPhone OS 4.0 will very quickly replace AmigaOS 4.x as the operating system behind the "OS4" moniker. ;-)

[Trev]

That's part of the speculation, though--that the current tools compile for ARM and the code runs on an emulator, paving the way for iPhone OS 4.0 and the XCode stack to support native PowerPC binaries. EDIT: Can't watch the vid at work. Will have to look later....

[Trev]

Or, Apple could have implemented a very effective emulation. You wouldn't necessarily have a way to determine this within your app. Or you could be right. Either way, it's a fun bit of speculation. ;-)

[Trev]

You never know. Video recording was sprung on an unsuspecting audience at a radio and television industry conference, for example, and while dynamic recompilation was in use as early as the 1970's, the UltraHLE Nintendo 64 emulator still caught the gaming industry completely off guard.

[Trev]

@Karlos

Which would make it not an ARM Cortex-A8. Still possible, though, since the PA Semi folks had experience with numerous architectures, yeah? Apple has extensive experience with PowerPC, ARM, and dynamic recompilation. I'm definitely not a PowerPC zealot, but a move back to the architecture would be interesting in terms of setting Apple apart from the competition (although it's certainly already capable of doing that using commodity chips).